I tend to agree with Joachim - we will see more data publication and at least in this phase will see plenty of institutions coining their own URIs. However, I also believe that the web tends towards less duplication (this isn't anything close to no duplication, just less duplication than we would have otherwise).
We are already seeing that established URIs will be used where they exist (e.g. for LCSH) - and I guess we can expect to see more of these.
That said, I think aggregations are a good thing (and inevitable) - and the more identifiers are shared, and the more people make sameas and similar statements, the easier aggregation will become.
In terms of what we should be doing now? I'd say:
Encourage re-use of URIs (ideally this would be baked into record creation in libraries, but that's a whole other ball game)
Encourage sameas statements where new URIs have been coined (and appropriate)
Start looking at how existing linked data representations of bibliographic data can be crawled and aggregated and see what works and what doesn't
I'm sure there is other stuff, but those are the ones that spring to mind first
The work of the JISC 'RDTF' (Resource Discovery Task Force) in the UK is looking at the strategy of 'publish' and 'aggregate' - although this doesn't dictate the use of Linked Data or RDF, many of the project falling into this area are adopting that approach, so hopefully we will see a good exploration of some of the issues from this area soon. See http://rdtf.mimas.ac.uk/ for more information on this.
Owen
Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: owen@ostephens.com
Telephone: 0121 288 6936
On 23 Mar 2011, at 17:16, stu wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 1:18 AM, Neubert Joachim <J.Neubert@zbw.eu> wrote:
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> I'm not sure that a centralized model for building clusters (like VIAF) or a pre-declared central hub ("everybody maps to WorldCat/OpenLibrary/whatever") could work.
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> A centralized model is essential if global bibliography is to be an important part of the Web. Sure, there are work-arounds involving declared or inferred equivalence. These all require additional work on the part of systems and people, which will rarely be expended, with the result that link potency will (continue to) be diluted to insignificance.
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> Is it important enough for the global library community to expend the resources to consolidate meaningful global bibliography? Can the political impediments be overcome?
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> I continue to believe that OCLC is the only likely candidate with a chance to make this happen, and it appears that the business cases are too weak, and constituent demand too feeble for that to happen in the current environment.
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> I just Googled the book closest to hand, and on the first page, Wikipedia was number one, and there were two Amazon links in the top ten. No library link of any sort appeared on the page.
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> Linked data isn't going to change this without a centralized identifier infrastructure.
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> stu
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